Raisuddin “Rais” Bhuiyan was 27 years old when he arrived in Texas in 2001, a trained pilot with the Bangladeshi air force who had a knack for computer programming. Rais was one of those immigrants the US loves to love: ambitious, educated, their potential thwarted in their home country, willing to work long hours at entry-level jobs in their diligent pursuit of the American dream.
Immigrants such as Rais are often mystified by Americans such as Mark Stroman, or mystified by the US from which they emerge, one where much-vaunted freedoms are limited and complicated by “chaos and hedonism and social corrosion”, where liberty and selfhood, instead of leading to upward mobility, can fail people as surely as can the strictures of a society such as Bangladesh.
The very different paths of these two men crossed violently the day Stroman went out hunting "Arabs" in Dallas, in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, and this is the story the New York Times journalist Anand Giridharadas tells in The True American.
In 2001 Stroman was 31 years old, and his life had long been a mess. His upbringing had been unstable and abusive; possibly he had foetal alcohol syndrome. He used drugs, including crystal meth; he was racist, xenophobic and in possession of a significant arsenal. He’d been in and out of prison.
He was also a member of the United States’ newest beleaguered demographic: straight white men. “If you were a woman or black or gay or an immigrant from some punished republic,” Giridharadas writes, “this time was very likely a better time for you than your parents’ time. Your personal liberty had grown enough to distract you from the nation’s broader situation.”
Focus for rage
The attacks of September 11th provided Stroman with a focus for his rage. He declared himself an “American terrorist” and, days after 9/11, targeted three innocent men. He murdered an Indian, Vasudev Patel, and a Pakistani, Waqar Hasan, and attempted to murder Rais Bhuiyan. He called his crime one of patriotism. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.
The shooting left Bhuiyan seriously injured and without sight in one eye. Uninsured, he soon racked up medical bills of tens of thousands of dollars. His fiancee back in Dhaka deserted him. He suffered from nightmares, flashbacks and depression. But Bhuiyan was not a quitter. He got a job as a waiter, took up his studies again and eventually landed a good IT job.
In 2009 Bhuiyan took his mother to Mecca, where he recalled a promise he’d made as he lay bleeding in the minimart on the day of the shooting: if God spared him he would dedicate his life to doing something for others.
Back in the US Bhuiyan devised a plan: he would publicly forgive Stroman and campaign to save his attacker’s life. Bhuiyan is a Muslim, and he drew on the Koran for messages of mercy.
Stroman, meanwhile, had become something of a death-row celebrity. He wrote a blog, facilitated by Ilan Ziv, an Israeli documentarymaker and the son of a Holocaust survivor, who’d got to know Stroman while researching grassroots peacemaking initiatives – “wonderful people with zero impact on society” – and hate crimes.
Many, including Ziv, believed Stroman was changing for the better – at one point he was reading the work of the existential therapist Viktor Frankl – although two members of Stroman’s family felt he was conning “these do-gooder types” and would have said anything to save himself.
But Bhuiyan’s campaign to have Stroman’s sentence commuted to life was making little progress with Texas lawmakers. In 2011, with the execution date looming, Bhuiyan filed a lawsuit, arguing that Stroman’s death would deny him his right under Texas law to victim-offender mediation. He lost, and Stroman was executed. The foundation Bhuiyan founded during his campaign, World Without Hate, continues to work to prevent hate crimes and foster cross-cultural empathy.
Exploring the dream
Giridharadas uses Stroman’s crime and its aftermath to engage in a compelling exploration of the current state of the American dream. The question arises, repeatedly, of what a “true American” is. Stroman used the phrase to refer to a certain internet manifesto, the bullet points of which include: “I believe that the money I make belongs to me and my family not some midlevel government functionary with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts squirting out babies.”
The irony is lost on him: he comes from a family of meth users and alcoholics, has been arrested for stealing property and has four children by two women, none of whom he has ever parented in any remotely healthy sense.
The irony is that today’s “true American” may, for instance, be Muslim and speak a halting English but believe more humbly and vehemently in the dream than the white, native-born Americans who would fear or scorn him.
Giridharadas is too canny to allow his tale to degenerate into cardboard cutouts of good and evil. He quotes Ziv on Bhuiyan: “I always felt that Rais could have had a shot at sainthood on this side of heaven if he had not become such a self-promoter.” The melange of dysfunctions that is the US now – celebrity culture, guns, ignorance, addiction, executions (and, yes, the kind of optimism that insists we might actually end hatred) – comes through loud and creepy.
Giridharadas presents an absorbing, haunting picture of what has happened to large tranches of the US, where the handholds of “family, company, union, church” have fallen away.
The film rights of this story have already been bought, with Kathryn Bigelow set to direct. It’s hard to imagine that Hollywood will be as nuanced as Giridharadas with this strange tale of “a half-blind immigrant citing the values of Islam in his plea that Texas not execute the white racist who sought to kill him”.
